The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high and at 95% it’s enough to put many people off! But why is the failure rate so high in affiliate marketing? Why do only 5% of affiliates succeed and make it their full time income? Affiliates get paid for promoting other people’s products and services over the internet.

When you successfully refer a customer to a product online, you earn a commission. But so many would-be affiliates simply aren’t patient enough and expect it to be easy. When they struggle to make sales many simply quit. But this is a big mistake. Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative; there’s just more to it than most people assume.

Affiliate Marketing Failure Rate – Assumptions

They say when you assume, you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”. But with affiliate marketing you can be forgiven for making assumptions. Affiliate marketing is a huge business and there’s millions of potential customers for the unscrupulous to exploit! People get drawn in to exaggerated claims of what you can earn. Take a look at the advert below which is one I found on Clickbank.

If you get drawn in to this type of hype, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you can make this kind of money easily online through affiliate marketing. But the reality is that it takes time and effort to build up a regular and stable income from affiliate marketing. Unfortunately, many marketers will use bold claims to put people off guard and take their money.

You can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing and many marketers will show you their earnings. Some are even legitimate but often they neglect to explain how they got there and what they spent on marketing!

When you join a program based on such assumptions, you’re bound to be disappointed with the results – that’s if you actually do any work in the first place! This leads us nicely to the next reason why so many affiliates fail.

Affiliate Marketing Failure Rate – Newbies Expect An Easy Win

Not only do new affiliates have a false expectation of what they can earn online, they also have an exaggerated view of how “easy” it will be. This can come down to the sales tactics and marketing messages, too. If someone promises you something which sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The 5% who actually make affiliate marketing their full time income work long and hard at their businesses. They invest time and money; they test and measure their marketing, they keep going when things are tough; they never give up!

This often doesn’t show in their marketing. Instead, many marketers show large earnings and images of their “perfect” lifestyle instead! They show pictures of expensive sports cars and dream houses! They sell the dream and this gives new affiliate marketers a distorted view of what’s involved in becoming successful as an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing Failure Rate – Why New Affiliates Fail

As a beginner in affiliate marketing, I jumped from course to course and got nowhere. I expect it’s the same for many people entering into affiliate marketing for the first time. I bought all the courses which told me how easy it was going to be! That’s the message I wanted to hear! Because it wasn’t easy, I assumed I needed another course; which taught a different strategy. So the pattern continued.

This is known as “shiny object syndrome”. As long as you believe that it should be easy, you’ll continue to come up against the reality that it isn’t! It’s a business like any other. You need to sell things to make any money and that’s a skill.

Another problem affiliates have is controlling their time. With a job you get paid for showing up but with affiliate marketing you only get performance related pay. As a beginner, I wasted a huge amount of time on activities which were unproductive. I would spend time on making a website look nice, or on a logo. Meanwhile I had no traffic, no sales or marketing strategy! Just a shiny looking website and zero visitors, let alone sales!

The Catch 22 Of Marketing An Affiliate Product

Initially when you become an affiliate marketing there will be some learning you need to do. You can set up your sales funnel, websites and start building. Once you have some skills under your belt, it’s important to use them and not get stuck in learning mode.

Learning mode can feel like progress so it can be addictive. You feel as though you’re making progress when your learning. But you must remember affiliate marketing is performance based so you’ll need to switch your time to actually building your business but also keep learning.

The ratio at first is 100% learning. Once you know some stuff switch it to 80% implementing and 20% learning, otherwise you won’t make any progress.

The catch 22 of affiliate marketing is when it comes to implementing a marketing strategy. Whether you’re running paid ads or building content, you’ll get better results the longer you do it for. But as a beginner, you’ll be looking for evidence that it works! You can completely hamper your strategy with doubt and uncertainty. Timid marketing campaigns are cut off when your fear kicks in! So the results are poor. But without a strong campaign, you won’t get results.

As a beginner you’re sceptical and doubtful and so reluctant to spend a lot of money on marketing, or spend a lot of time building content without proof that it will work! Here’s the catch 22! Without work you won’t get the results. Without mistakes you can’t learn and collect data to build from. Imperfect action is better than perfect procrastination!

Low Barriers To Entry

The affiliate marketing failure rate is also so high because there’s such low barriers to entry. Anyone can “have a go” at affiliate marketing for very little. Most affiliate products offer partner programs anyone can join for free. Some don’t even require you to show you have a website.

Once you have joined a partner program, you’re effectively an affiliate marketer – at least on paper; no investment, no sacrifice. YouTube videos and blogs can help affiliates so much, but basically you’re on your own unless you invest in a mentorship program. Having mentorship and software can help you as an affiliate, but you still have to make it work. Spending money on programs, training and sales funnels doesn’t guarantee success. Here lies another potential problem for those forking out for expensive courses and training; entitlement.

Affiliate Marketing Failure Rate – Entitlement

“I’ve spent money on a course, why haven’t I earned anything yet?” A course or series of trainings is just that; a course or trainings. No course should guarantee any results ever because ultimately it’s down to you to put in the groundwork and make your business work.

I’ve been there too and it’s heartbreaking. I worked for years and nothing seemed to work. I expected a certain course to action to yield results, quickly! It didn’t work. The 95% quit and say “it” doesn’t work whereas the 5% ask themselves: “why didn’t that work and what can I do differently?”.

When you’ve shelled out your heard earned cash and got nowhere, it’s a bitter pill to swallow. But ultimately it comes down to your reasons why you’re doing it. If you have a cushy job and it’s just a hobby, it’s no big deal. But if you simply have to make it work to survive, or to escape your miserable boss or job, there’s a different motivation and mindset involved.

A strong “why?” can overcome almost any “how?”.

Employee Mindset Vs. Entrepreneurial Mindset

You’ve been programmed. Yes you have. Don’t deny it! If you’re an employee or have been one, chances are good that you expect a hard day at work to yield a certain amount of money. With an online business and affiliate marketing, a hard day’s work doesn’t show any results, in most cases! A week of work might not yield any results either, in monetary terms.

When you’ve worked for years and there’s nothing to show, you might want to change your strategy! But in a job, working doing those same tasks again and again yields rewards. Why then doesn’t it work for affiliate marketing?

With an online business you can’t bring your employee mindset with you and expect the same results you would receive in a job. In a job, the boss tells you what to do. In a business, you must be the driving force overseeing the operation, not just working as a “technician” playing a small role. As employees transitioning into entrepreneurial life, we can’t help but bring some of our old programming from old jobs and habits with us.

These old habits can stand in the way of our affiliate success.

Training & Education

I was so excited to get started in affiliate marketing because I was told how easy it would be to make lots of money! Sadly it wasn’t true. It took me years to find a good course and community of online business mentors to help me. Even then my journey was just beginning.

Here’s another reason why the affiliate marketing failure rate is so high. New affiliates expect too much and don’t invest in their education. Expecting things to be easy, they simply jump in and fail, then give up. Only a small amount of affiliates actually invest their time and money and learn the skills they need to be successful.

When you’re more invested, you will go further.

Business Models and Marketing Strategies

There’s various business models and marketing strategies within affiliate marketing. You can go it alone and learn from free videos and blogs on the internet. Or, you can invest and learn from affiliate marketing mentors. Some affiliate products you can promote for free and others require a subscription. But one key to earning online is to use the right business model. Affiliate marketing business models vary across the board. You can sell a physical product from Amazon for example for $10 and earn $0.03. At 3% commission, you’re going to need to sell a lot of products to make an income.

Alternatively, you can promote recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate programs and earn much larger commissions doing what can be the same amount of work. Digital products typically pay much more than physical products too – 40% commissions compared to 3-12% for physical products.

Trust & Direction

As a beginner affiliate, it can be easy to follow a strategy for some time which doesn’t work very well. As a beginner I joined a course which offered a strategy which was rapidly becoming out of date. It suggested I built niche websites with the aim of ranking them on the search engines and getting free traffic. I launched several sites and worked on this strategy for months. All but one of my sites were complete failures; and that one made only one or two sales!

Trusting a particular direction is difficult too. When you’ve seen sales come in from a strategy, you know for a fact that it works. But in the early days as a beginner, it’s all on faith. If you don’t believe in the strategy, or fail to implement it correctly, all your work can be for nothing! That’s a tough pill to swallow and accounts for many affiliates who simply give up. I was nearly one of them!

Fail, Fail, Fail Some More!

A common experience in affiliate marketing is not getting any sales. In the early days you need to take some encouragement in the small wins. A small win might be posting an article on your website, or setting up an advert. It could be a click on your article or a lead subscribing into your email list. You can’t expect money to just flow in from the get go. Instead, success comes by celebrating the small wins and keeping going no matter what. Take small steps forwards each and every day.

Trying things you haven’t tried is also key. Most affiliates quit because they don’t get sales. But they don’t stick with it for long enough – they’re too impatient. Failing forwards is a phrase used to explain the journey of an affiliate marketing. Without failure, you can’t learn. Most of what you do in the early days of being an affiliate won’t count for much. But eventually, over time you should see some small wins. Celebrate them! Keep going, and never quit! That’s what the 5% do!

If you’re serious about building an online business, expect to spend time learning and growing personally. You have to earn consistent success with affiliate marketing and it’s not easy route. But there are great rewards or those who stick the journey.

Here’s a great explanation of how it is with affiliate marketing from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits.

The valley of disappointment is where many affiliates quit. As new affiliates you expect your progress to be linear. But instead, there’s a lot of work to be done which appears to be unrewarded.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Also the analogy of the bamboo tree is worth a mention too here.

If you plant a Chinese Bamboo shoot, you might be forgiven in thinking that it’s dead, and give up! In fact, the Chinese Bamboo tree does nothing for four years. So you can water it and fertilise it, and nothing will show – for four whole years!

But in a six week period the Chinese Bamboo tree grows to be 90 feet tall! It has also been measured to grow 48 inches in a 24 hour period!

An affiliate business works like this too. There’s a lot of work to be done before you see any results at all. But if you stick at it, results can appear and increase exponentially over time.

The 5% of affiliates who succeed keep going through the tough times and trust the journey. The 95% don’t see the bigger picture and quit, assuming it just doesn’t work!

Another Analogy

Another analogy for new affiliates is this one. The long term super affiliates have made thousands or even millions of dollars from affiliate marketing. This is true. But they usually have also spent thousands or millions in marketing dollars too. They tested and measured countless adverts before they were successful – often at vast cost.

Once they figure out which adverts work they then start optimising those ads for performance. With all this experience, long term affiliates are effectively trawler ships looking for fish. They have huge fleets of ships scouring the seas which have huge nets. So they can catch a lot of “fish” i.e. customers for their products!

A beginner has zero experience and they are given a fishing line and bait.